


what dreams may come

by sarkany



Category: Kingsman (Movies)
Genre: Age Difference, Demon!Harry - Freeform, Dubious Consent, Gothic Romance, M/M, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, incubus!harry, massive massive age difference, misinterpretation of mythology and Arthurian myth, the unholy marriage of many literary genres to produce this frankenstein's monster
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-18
Updated: 2016-12-05
Packaged: 2018-08-07 09:00:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 8,238
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7708975
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sarkany/pseuds/sarkany
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Eggsy dreams of writhing shadows that wear Harry’s face, but that too dissolves into the impression of white eyes and teeth. He dreams of getting pushed back onto silk sheets that feel delicious against his bare back.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Mareridt](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mareridt/gifts).



Harry waits until the bruises have faded from their vivid purples and blues to a sickly yellow-green, the colour of unripe limes. Judicious application of concealer would hide them easily enough, and the strobing lights of the clubs would do the rest.

Over the last week, the humming unease prickling under his skin had morphed into a grinding ache deep in his bones.  He hasn’t seen Eggsy since last week, and already, he can feel the boy slipping away. He can feel himself slipping away.

His reflection only looks like a passible imitation of Harry Hart, like it had been stitched imperfectly together from hazy recollections and faded photographs. He touches the smooth skin at the corners of his eyes. He hadn’t thought he’d ever miss his wrinkles or grey hairs.

This body doesn’t remember Gibraltar, or Madrid, or any of the thousand imperfections wrought upon it by age and experience. Its skin is unmarked as Paris’s when he seduced Helen away from her husband. Several hundred years of work, undone in a gunshot.

If Valentine were still alive, Harry would let him die a slower and crueller death.

In one smooth motion, he punches the mirror. Broken shards of glass tinker around his feet, embed themselves into his hand. There’s no pain, apart from the gnawing hunger in his bones, and he watches as ichor wells up from the cuts on his knuckles and drips onto the floor. His blood smells faintly sweet, like flowers.

# **

The morning sunshine hits him full in the face, exacerbating an already throbbing headache. His mouth tastes a bit coppery and a lot like a small, decaying rodent. He must’ve overindulged yesterday.

Someone shifts on the bed next to him. Harry has the gun stashed under the pillow cocked and aimed before he recognizes Eggsy.

On the one hand, Eggsy is known and trusted and almost certainly not an enemy spy.

On the other hand, Harry is absolutely appalled at himself for losing control and bedding his proposal before the dog test, not that Harry has any  _doubts_ , but insinuations of partiality must be avoided.  

Also the small but regrettable fact that sleeping with Eggsy before the rituals of induction would kill him.

From the bedside table, Eggsy’s alarm starts playing something tinny and musically vulgar. Eggsy slaps at it ineffectively before staggering out of bed and into the bathroom. He’s wearing atrocious fuzzy orange slippers. Harry can’t recall owning any article of clothing that particular, offensive shade.

Eggsy starts singing in the shower, voice clear and bright and  _alive_. Harry lets that propel him to his feet and into today’s suit, the grey Prince of Wales check. When he exits the room, the right side of his bed is undisturbed and the pillow undented.

The staircase banister and the picture frames all have a thin film of dust. He’ll have to have a stern word with the housekeeper, maybe once his headache subsides into manageable proportions.

The automatic date on the fridge reads  _February 13 th_, and a lance of pain tears itself through Harry’s head.

When he opens his fridge, he’s nearly overpowered by the stench of rot and decay. The vegetables have coalesced into a fuzzy mat of putrescent mould, which is absurd because he just went grocery shopping two days ago, before Eggsy’s train test— _the scorching heat of the Midwest_ —the boy shouting at him from the loo— _blood drying tackily on his skin, stumbling out of the church_ —Valentine raising his arm.

Shakily, he lifts his hand to his temple.

The cobwebby strands of healing break and part around his hand.  Normally, steel bullet jackets only contain half enough iron to do him damage. He had been careless, had spent too long among humans.

_Blast and damnation._

The worst has already healed over. Scabs twine their way in force chains around the puckered entrance wound. No exit wound, which meant that the cursed thing was still rattling away in his skull.

His house holds itself with a blanketing stillness; there’s a blanket of dust coating everything, undisturbed except for his trail of footsteps into the kitchen.

When he walks back upstairs, the bathroom is empty. He can still hear Eggsy singing, a voice originating from nowhere and echoing around the room. Now that denial and expectation no longer shroud his vision, he can see his house, his true house, returning to its nature. The noises of London fade away, buildings and cars replaced by enormous hawthorns.

The tub sprouts claws; his bed turns into a monstrosity of silk and velvet. With a massive groan, the landing pulls free of its moorings to London and expands to fit an entire suit of armour. He feels like the worst sort of cliché. At least the butterflies stay the same, albeit thoroughly coated in dust.

# **

Harry Hart had spent fifty-five years in his latest body when Gary Unwin burst into his life. An egregious age difference was made all the more egregious by the simple fact that Harry’s birth certificate was half a millennia incorrect.

Age had allowed him to stretch years between each feeding, but the boy had rekindled an old hunger, which had necessitated the indignity of clubbing every fortnight. He could have seduced Eggsy; the boy was already half in love with him as it was. But he had been tempted, in a way he hadn’t been for over a century. He had wanted to  _keep_ Eggsy.  

This was worse. The healing had burned through the bulk of his energy, which could only be restored at the expense of others. He wants to rip the boy’s soul from his body and devour it whole.

Eggsy haunts him from the living world. He appears, ghostlike, trailing through rooms, passing through the pieces of furniture that were too tasteless to be brought to the London house, and leaving no footprints in the dust that refuses to remain swept away. 

Despite all his efforts, Harry can’t make Eggsy see him. His hands pass through the boy’s shoulder, throwing plates only creates a mess that Eggsy blithely steps through, slammed doors restore themselves to their original position seconds later.

Every night, Harry tells himself that he’ll sleep in the guest room. Every night, he lies down next to that bright- burning soul and resists the urge to tear.

At first, Harry wanders the grey limbo at the borders of the sleeping world. It had been centuries since he last had to resort to feeding from dreams, and the entrances had changed in the intervening years. He was too weak to do any more than wander.

# **

In the gaping chasms of power following Valentine’s day, Eggsy had quietly settled himself into the niche carved out by the late Agent Galahad. Harry Hart, having no heirs of the body and only one of the mind, left the entirety of his estate to his replacement, with the provision that if any of his proposals had passed the final test, the estate be split among them or their nearest heirs after his death.

His therapist had vociferously argued against living in Harry’s house, but there was a comfort in Mr. Pickle, the dead butterflies trapped behind glass, the wall of  _Sun_ articles. Harry’s legacy could live on, the knowledge that he had permanently shaped history, even if the man himself could not be there to see it.

If Eggsy sometimes cried himself to sleep, hugging a dress shirt that mostly smelled like starch and only a little bit like Harry’s cologne, then that was nobody’s business but his own.

The dreams don’t come until May, when Eggsy throws open all the windows he can find, to welcome in the spring breeze. His therapist had warned him against nightmares, and Eggsy had braced himself for a nightly litany of nameless faces and plumes of multi-coloured smoke. They never came.

Instead, Eggsy dreams of walking in the twilight through forests of hawthorn and oak. Sometimes, he can glimpse an old house in the distance, but no matter which of the paths he takes, he can’t find it again.  

Beltane comes and goes, and then he dreams of writhing shadows that wear Harry’s face, but that too dissolves into the impression of white eyes and teeth. He dreams of getting pushed back onto silk sheets that feel delicious against his bare back. He knows with gut-deep certainty that they’re inside the house, except he can’t remember all the steps leading up to him being urgently backed into the bedroom.

Harry—or rather Harry’s face and hands and build, with the rest of the details rather awkwardly fleshed out by the last man Eggsy had bedded—his hands gentle on the slope of Eggsy’s jaw, kissing wet and slick and  _wanting_.

The enormous fire opposite the bed throws each muscle on Harry’s body into sharp relief, casts crazy shadows with the bones of his face. The unsteady light makes it easier to ignore how Harry’s mouth sometimes stretches too wide, how his irises sometimes flicker from brown to a light-sucking black.

Eggsy smooths his palms up Harry’s back and pulls him down. Harry’s skin is cool, almost shockingly so against the heat of the fireplace not two meters away.

He buries his face into Harry’s neck. This way, he doesn’t need to see the way Harry’s ankle wavers in and out of existence. There’s a compass tattooed above Harry’s hip. Eggsy vaguely remembers Thomas being inordinately proud of how much it hurt.

Harry catches the lobe of Eggsy’s ear with his teeth, shocking a high keening noise out of Eggsy. He wants Harry to be  _in_ him, and then Harry is pushing in with one long slick slide.

‘My dear boy,’ Harry murmurs against his temple.

Eggsy wakes up sweating, staring at a ceiling dimly outlined by street lights. He smells Harry’s cologne, and his heart leaps in wild moment of hope. But no, he finds Harry’s shirt, unforgivably wrinkled and stained with fluids, twisted beneath him.

Harry was dead, and he had died disappointed in Eggsy.

# **

Eggsy gets assigned a mission the next day. He sleeps with the windows open, letting the dry heat of Istanbul overpower the sputtering efforts of the central A.C. Eggsy wanders under towering oak trees. Evening sunlight dapples the forest floor, and Eggsy knows without looking that the house isn’t here.

Harry doesn’t appear.

# **

The house doesn’t reappear in his dreams until he returns to England.

The gate unlatches itself obligingly as Eggsy approaches. The gravel walk, choked by weeds and stinging nettle, leads to a wildly overgrown garden. He walks through strangely deformed hawthorn trees, their flowers faintly luminescent in the moonlight.

Two massive winged gargoyles crouch on either side of the door, but they shift obligingly to let Eggsy pass inside. Overhead, a chandelier flickers to life, illuminating dust several inches thick and enough cobwebs to make a shroud.

The house shudders, and the dust disappears. Eggsy walks on silent feet through the enormous foyer. The carpet and upholstery are a deep crimson, richly embroidered with small five-petaled flowers.

With an enormous groan of effort, the wall sconces sputter to life and gleam off of enormous glass cases that line the walls. Inside, butterflies lie pinned in neat rows, and Eggsy recognizes a few from Harry’s collection back home.

‘Eggsy?’ Harry asks, half hidden behind the next doorway. His voice has gravel in it, like he had been woken up from a deep sleep. He shuffles forwards in slippers and the red dressing gown Eggsy may have fantasized about a few times in the last weeks before the dog test (before Harry  _died_ ).

Eggsy stands rooted to the spot, obscurely guilty, and lets Harry approach him. Harry doesn’t stop until he’s well within Eggsy’s personal space. Without hesitation or self-consciousness, he runs his fingers through Eggsy’s hair and tilts his head up for a kiss.

Eggsy exhales, blinks, and suddenly Harry is braced above him. He manages to take in the fireplace and the enormous bed before Harry kisses him, and all thought flees his head.

Harry kisses his way slowly down Eggsy’s body. Eggsy’s not sure when their clothing disappeared, if Harry wrestled them off physically or through the same magic that whirled them from the foyer up into the bedroom.

This doesn’t feel like last time. That was a series of writhing impressions, flashes of teeth and cock. Now, Eggsy feels present, grounded though the electric contact of Harry’s skin against his.

He can feel Harry’s bulk settle against his hip and Harry’s leg hair rubbing coarsely against his own. His hair has started to flop; gel losing the fight against sweat and the warmth of the fire.  

Harry bites down on his nipple, then laves the sting away with his tongue. Eggsy chokes back a noise that sounds suspiciously like a sob, and lets himself have this, just for tonight.

# **

Eggsy is beginning to think his therapist had a point; moving back into the house makes it harder to let go, not easier. It feels like Harry’s still alive, just in the other room.  He smells coffee brewing, finds doors shut when he left them open, trips over furniture that seems to get rearranged overnight.

He aches almost constantly now. When he sleeps, he doesn’t believe that Harry’s miraculously still alive. But he can pretend. 

The dreams aren’t always about sex. Sometimes, they sit companionably with Eggsy’s feet in Harry’s lap, Harry rubbing circles into Eggsy’s ankle. The trees outside rustle in the breeze. Harry’s hands are warm and soothing.

‘I miss you,’ Eggsy says. Harry looks up from  _The Sun_ , February 13th. It’s always February 13th, even on the fridge. Eggsy had tried changing the date exactly once, and he’d woken up with such a ferocious headache that he hadn’t dared try again.

‘Darling boy, I’m right here.’

He wakes up.

He wakes up feeling like he has not slept, as if he had merely stepped from one reality to this one. He knows which reality he prefers.

He wakes with bruises pressed into his hips. In the corner of his eye he sees an enormous fireplace where the bedroom windows should be. The only thing that seems constant is Harry. Harry no longer shifts with the firelight or disappears into smoke when Eggsy looks away.

# **

Time moves differently in dreams.

They manage to air out the living room, the drawing room, the study, the library, the guest room, the second guest room— _‘How many rooms do you even have in this place Harry?’_

 _Harry quirks a strange smile that wavers at the edges. ‘As many as needed.’_ —before Eggsy blinks at the unapologetic digital clock reading 1:28 AM.

When Eggsy falls asleep again, Harry has already waxed the floors and polished all the spare cutlery. The house seems to be doing its best to speed things along. Sometimes, Eggsy will turn the corner and find wallpaper or a table that reminds him of the London house.

They finish washing the curtains in the ballroom. Eggsy’s stomach growls, shockingly loud and amplified by the excellent acoustics of the room.

‘Are you hungry?’ Harry asks.

‘I could eat,’ Eggsy replies. He doesn’t move from where he’s collapsed on the floor. He feels like his arms are about to give out.

‘I will fetch something,’ Harry says, eyes intense on Eggsy’s face. He backs away slowly towards the door, like Eggsy is a skittish animal that’ll bolt at the slightest provocation.

Harry returns with a plate of crumpets, lightly toasted and smeared with a crimson jam that tastes like sex. He watches Eggsy eat with an intensity that he usually reserves for watching Eggsy shuddering into orgasm.

# **

Merlin doesn’t say anything when Eggsy moves into Harry’s old house. He had felt the shock ripple across the Atlantic when Harry was forcibly ripped from this world. He left a quiet word for the Statesman. They knew to burn the corpse with birch and to bury the ashes with salt and thrice forged iron.

He makes the (false) assumption that the London house was nothing more than a waypoint, and it would’ve done Eggsy some good to live somewhere that reminded him of a safer and happier time.

When winter turns to spring turns to summer, Merlin lets himself relax and turns his attention to the turmoil overseas.  _Kingsman_ occupies itself with finding a new Arthur. In this day and age, enchanting a sword-in-stone was laughably easy and the bureaucratic side required comprehensive background checks. Merlin babysits agents and sleeps in snatches between mission briefs and tech updates and proposal training.

Eggsy seems determined to fill in the late Galahad’s shoes in the worst ways, down to the double-breasted suits and perpetual tardiness. He proves to be an exemplary agent, if a bit prone to  _indiscretions_. But the boy had almost enthralled an incubus,  _The Incubus_ , which was no mean feat even for the faen, and what paramours he did take came and went with the wind.

Midsummer’s night passes without incident, and Merlin makes no note of it except that Galahad appears exceptionally tired the next morning. Taliesin declares Galahad to be in ‘no more psychological danger than the rest of you suicidal nitwits,’ and Merlin stops worrying entirely.

He stops worrying until Samhain, when Eggsy walks into his office and sets off two alarms in the sleeping realm.

“I didn’t know you kept piskies,” Eggsy says, looking at standing clock behind his desk, where Merlin does indeed keep piskies.

Eggsy glances around curiously, as if seeing Merlin’s office for the first time, and his gaze unerringly lands on his scrying bowl, his raven, his scrolls.

Eggsy looks healthy, pink-cheeked and bright eyed. Merlin carefully throws a burst of energy and the illusion unravels in shivery strands. Eggsy’s tan fades into a sallow hue, and he has a suck mark high on his neck. Faintly, there’s a faint flowery smell of decay and sex.

Hawthorn flowers.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know you wanted smut, and I am so sorry but I kind of do a fade to black here because I wrote the word "cock" and thought the ground was going to swallow me up


	2. Chapter 2

Merlin digs out his cloak and his staff and spends a solid half hour coaxing the damned things awake. He hasn’t had need to use either of them since the last world war, as Valentine’s little doomsday plot had primarily damaged the waking world, and they were as reluctant and prickly as hibernating bears.

Merlin has only been Merlin since the 1919 Round Table, but the mantle of Merlin had been passed down from sorcerer to bard to wizard since eldritch horrors first emerged from the Dreaming. He draws that mantle around himself now, in preparation, and tucks his tools of trade into the pockets of his robes. He feels naked without the thick heaviness of a beard.

The house refuses to let him through the front gate. He spends a futile hour oiling its hinges, but the gate doesn’t lose a single speck of rust. Figures that Harry’s dominion would be just as stubborn as he was. Is.

He hacks his way through the hedge behind the house, which shivers in disapproval.

‘Hush you,’ he says, brushing irritably at the sap smeared onto his robe in luminescent streaks. ‘This all could’ve been avoided if you had just let me through the proper door to begin with.’

A shutter falls off, narrowly missing his head. But the thorny branches of hawthorn pull back slightly, and the door creaks obligingly open. Merlin hesitates before entering. To trespass without express permission was dangerous, doubly so now that Harry was no longer Galahad. 

He seats himself at the head of a massive oak table and waits.

Harry shuffles in at precisely 7:09, four minutes after Eggsy usually leaves home. He looks healthy, sleep rumpled in his red dressing gown and velvet slippers, still flushed and damp from a quick shower.

“Eggsy, what’re you-” he starts to say before seeing Merlin seated at his table. “Merlin.”

Merlin had watched when Harry was shot, when Harry’s remains had been scraped off the blistering heat of the tarmac, and when the heap of flesh that was once his oldest and dearest friends burnt into oily smoke and ashes.

Somehow that’s hard to reconcile with Harry standing there hale and mostly whole. Apart from a faint tracery of scar tissue spiderwebs across his temple, Harry looks unchanged from when he stepped onto the plane to Kentucky. Mostly unchanged.

“Didn’t know you had a tattoo.” His voice doesn’t crack. When Eggsy became Galahad and dissolved the last bond that had tied Harry to the mortal world, Merlin had broken every crystal in his office. 

Harry grimaces minutely, gaze fixed on an utterly appalling crystal chandelier five feet above Merlin’s head. “Eggsy certainly seems to think I do.”

The name hangs precisely in the air between them, clear as the noonday bell.

“About that—” Merlin starts to say.  

“What I do is no longer any affair of yours,” Harry interrupts flatly. Behind him, the lights start to dim and flicker. A heartbeat later, Harry is wearing his favourite double-breasted navy pinstripe, his hair ruthlessly tamed into submission. Once again he is Agent Galahad at the height of his physical health. But Harry is no longer Kingsman, no longer the man Merlin knew except in name and borrowed form.

 “It is when you involve one of the knights.” Merlin makes an abortive gesture for his staff. The house loses the pleasant fiction of existing in space-time, becomes a distorted half-echo of lust—manners—violence in architectural form.

The simplest solution would have been to banish Harry whence he came, and Merlin lets the knowledge that he can, but chose not to, settle heavily over his shoulders.  He badly wants to stand up and face Harry head-on, but he had chosen the pacifist route and had sat at the table in the futile hope that they’d be able to settle this like sensible people in the 21st century.

He brings forward a small jar—made of yew, lined with silver, and full of Harry’s ashes—and sets it on the table.

Merlin doesn’t let himself look away from the way colour then light then form bleach out of Harry. What’s left isn’t so much human, but an impression of too many teeth and eyes and gnawing hunger. Harry Hart, sans _Kingsman_.

 _what do you propose, wizard?_   The thing—Harry—asks, disembodied. The house echoes with his voice. 

“A bargain.” Merlin’s voice comes out stifled, words dropped like dead birds in an anechoic chamber. That, too, is a victory, that he has bleached himself so thoroughly that no vestige of emotion seeps through the cracks of his heart.

## **

The bargain and the bullet sit nestled together in his trouser pocket. It’s comforting to feel Harry anchored into the world once again.

 “Galahad,” Merlin weights the name, anchors it into the when and where of now. This isn’t a conversation he wants to have more than once, or with another Galahad.

## **

“You sit in the Siege Perilous.” Merlin’s voice floats from somewhere far away.

Eggsy knows he should be paying attention, that this is Important. Someone, him, replies “The what?” and that’s his voice, his accent, his words.

“Every Galahad has died in battle. In a quest.” Merlin’s head gleams under the fluorescent light, reflects the flickering candle-light _. The raven tilts its head, gives a desultory peck at Merlin’s desktop computer._ Eggsy can’t be seeing it, it’s a hallucination brought by stress and too little sleep, and he’d been meaning to bring them up during therapy. Every time, the words had died trapped behind his teeth.

“Like mythically?” Dimly, he remembers a pleasant November day, crisp air eddying from the open window, scented with the autumnal fragrance of dying leaves. Someone stuffy had pontificated in soporific half-cadences about King Arthur and legend and myth. History lacked the immediacy of combat, the immersive-ness of tactics.

_Knight Galahad sitting in the perilous seat of Judas, bearer of the Holy shield, seeker of the Holy Grail. That one had died when the angels came to rip away his soul. Galahads turn to look at him now, even Harry, with the marks left by their grisly deaths demarcated clearly onto naked flesh._

 “—lahad? Eggsy? Oh for fucks sake.” Merlin slaps him full across the face, which doesn’t hurt, just shocks him back into wakefulness.  

“Harry doesn’t have a tattoo, does he?” Harry had half his head blown away by the bullet. Not as gruesome as some of the other deaths, but all the worse for it.

_The bullet hadn’t—doesn’t—won’t hurt. These modern weapons were bright and quick and severed life as neat as a flick of a butcher’s knife. But even the kindest death was not easy, the soul clings, makes the body suffer the indignities of piss and shit while fighting for just one more breath._

“Lad-“ Merlin starts, then stops, the first time Eggsy has seen him at a loss for words.

Eggsy feels the weightless drop of terror, knows with an animal certainty that he won’t like what’s coming next. Before he died, Harry had seen the silver bright bullet flying at him, and Eggsy feels that resigned clarity now.

Merlin presses both palms into his eyes like a child playing at hide-and-seek, keeping the world out.

“When Harry was shot,” Merlin says precisely, each word dripping black ink, “he died.”

## **

“You can’t come back.” Harry’s meticulously rearranging the cutlery, hands warming old silver, fingers curling over the solid heft of the forks and knives.

Eggsy’s thinking more clearly than he has in months. “You’re alive.”

“I was never alive.” Harry finally looks at him, eyes a black more profound that the singing emptiness between stars.

In the span of a step, Harry insinuates his arms around Eggsy’s waist, presses light kisses into Eggsy’s hair. Harry’s head explodes in a plume brilliant emerald. Around them, the house collapses into fine grey mist. Harry’s voice seems to reverberate between shadowy imprints of furniture.

“Goodbye, Galahad.”

## **

Eggsy doesn’t dream of the house after that. He still dreams of Harry, missing pieces of skull, rotting slowing in the Kentucky heat. Nightmares come rushing in, as if the house had been holding them in abeyance, and now they wanted to make up for time lost.

He spends one sleepless night digging through records of the dead, those who he was too slow to save and those he blew up in desperation. The world collectively wants to forget that almost all the survivors are also murderers, one way or another, or that their elected leaders condemned them to certain death. Eggsy can’t bring himself to regret those deaths. But their faces haunt his dreams, accusative and unquiet.

He doesn’t think about Harry, about what Merlin was so carefully implying.

The rest of the knights, especially the old guard, skirt around him. Treat him like some sort of ticking time bomb or disease vector. Eggsy ignores them, saves the world thrice in so many months, moves out of Harry’s house. Doesn’t think about Harry.

Eggsy avoids mirrors. He makes the decision to dress casually, polo and ripped jeans that sag just right, but finds that his fingers cringe from the vulgar fabric. He knows without knowing cuts of suits, neckerchief knots, codes of ethics centuries defunct. It hurts to see the lines of his body wearing the suit Harry had chosen so carefully, to see his stride settle into the familiar self-assured lope of a trained killer.

But it hurts worse to force himself into cheap fabric and garish colours, to force himself back into someone he no longer is. Was.

## **

He can’t remember Percival’s name. Or Merlin’s. He feels the creeping sense that he ought to, but every time he reaches for the memory, it slips out of his mental grasp. 

## **

He’s flipping on the double-bars, enjoying the slow burn of muscles well used, half remembering his old routine. Gymnastics is both harder and easier now that he’s two feet taller and several stone heavier, muscles built up from free running and the gruelling, sadistic routine Merlin makes the knights maintain. The weight of his bones drag him down, enough that his flips feel less like flying and more like flinging himself defiantly against gravity.

He’s only half listening to the tinny pop piped through Spotify when the song changes into something slow and sad, crooning about heartbreak and love lost. The layers of indifference he’d wrapped around his head, the weeks he’s spent ignoring his heart thrumming deep in his chest cavity, the pleasant distraction of aching muscles, they all break apart until he feels like he’s drowning.

He lands, the balls of his feet then knees then palms thwacking dully against the foam padding.

In the mirror, he sees his sweat staining his thin RAMC shirt. His shirt ought to be stained crimson from his heart bleeding out through his ribs.  In the mirror, his face looks like it’s carved of stone, stark lines dug beneath the delicate hollows of his eyes and the planes of his jaw cruelly stark. Food tastes like cardboard (like life), and it’s easiest not to eat.

His muscles are going to scream bloody murder for skipping his cooldown and stretches, but he wants to get somewhere safe while he’s still thrumming with adrenaline and dopamine from the workout.

Roxy finds him in one of the utility closets, scrunched up into the corner and shaking. Roxy shuts the door behind her and shuffles on her knees until she’s pressed tight against his left side. Her suit is going to be stained beyond belief, not even the magic powers of the dry cleaners at HQ are going to be able to rescue it

## **

Roxy finds Eggsy curled up into a miserable ball in the Lodestone Closet. Silvery scars superimpose themselves onto the healthy flesh of his temple.  

“Harry was alive, wasn’t he?” He sounds lost, scared, small.

“He was never alive.” Roxy never knows how to be comforting, aims for factual and ends up brusque. “I’m sorry Eggsy.”

“Harry said that too.” Eggsy gives a hiccupping laugh-snort. “He said he loved me. And….and I never said it back, because I thought it was a dream and he was dead.”

“Just because it was a dream doesn’t mean it wasn’t real.”

## **

“Sit.” Roxy shoves an ergonomic chair at his knees until he does. She starts pinning up branches covered in spiny green leaves, holly and pine and mistletoe, above the lintel.

“I should have seen the signs; you haven’t been eating or sleeping right for ages, look at how thin you’ve gotten.” She’s muttering to herself more than him, and it is actually kind of nice to be fussed over.

She pours him something fizzy and golden that tastes like concentrated sunlight. He’s sinking into a comfortable lassitude, ergonomic chair be damned, before his stomach gives on betrayed lurch. He bolts to the sink and throws up his lunch, his breakfast, and probably his internal organs.

The smell of vomit hits him all, and he has to gag and weakly bring up a thin, sickly yellow stream of liquid that burns his mouth.

Roxy’s rubbing his back in broad soothing circles, her gun calluses catching on the fabric of his shirt.

It’s raining outside, moisture dribbling miserably onto indifferent pedestrians and honking cars. He hadn’t noticed that on the walk back to Roxy’s. He throws open the kitchen window, lets the wind throw crystalline droplets across his face like a benediction.

He feels electric, like he’s fighting off ten men with nothing but his suit and his reflexes. The world bursts into bright existence around him and he’s drunk off the bitter fumes of petrol and cigarettes.

Roxy shuts the window, but the giddiness persists. The cabinets are painted a delicate, living green. He touches a reverential hand to the herbs Roxy has growing on her counter.  He hadn’t realized, now that it’s gone, how he’d felt wrapped in three layers of cotton wool, muffled from the world.

He feels profoundly glad to be alive.

“What was that?” he asks once the world stops looking quite so bright and full of wonder. 

“Honey and running water and a purgative. You’ll want to take an enema as well.” Roxy rummages through her pantry before presenting Eggsy with a small cloth pouch and a truly horrifying turkey baster.

Eggsy splutters.

“You’ve eaten and fucked in Faen. You need to get as much out of you as possible before you lose yourself over there.”

Eggsy furrows his brow, “I thought they were just, y’know, silly superstitions. Kinda like all you posh lots insisting on using six forks when one would’ve done. And I think I think I’d notice if I were—” Eggsy makes a hand gesture that he hopes encompasses the ‘fucking a fairy, not of the gay persuasion, but the kind with tits and sparkly wings.’

## **

 Harry can feel himself slipping away in half-measures. He’s being reduced, slowly, back into the same primal need that drew him into existence. He spends too long trying to knot his tie, but these hands have no muscle memory to fall back on, when memory itself has been sheared away.

He leaves the top two buttons of his shirt open, tries to ignore how the lines of his suit don’t look quite right without his tie. Resists the desire to drag on the mesh shirt and leather pants, to fall back into being. He wraps his bleeding hand in a fresh handkerchief, embroidered delicately with red thread, _H.H_.. He thinks the second H stands for Hale? Hart? Hearth? 

The young man slouched against the far corner of the bar has his hands shoved deep into the pockets of some atrocious jacket. His lips peel back with old distaste before a burst of fondness scatters his thoughts like a flock of birds. 

Harry allows himself one long look before seating himself at the bar. He feels eyes at the back of his neck and settles in to wait, basks in the glowing warmth of being ogled, of the puzzling fondness of a half-remembered memory. Perhaps an old lover. 

Not five minutes later, the boy throws himself into the stool next to Harry. Under the recessed lights at the bar, his hair glows faintly blond. Harry isn’t disappointed by the boy’s grey eyes, because he’s not expecting them to be green.

He takes the boy back with him, back home, to the London house. He ignores how his key sticks in his lock and oppressive darkness inside. Shoves the boy against the front door and snogs him until the boy is clutching helplessly at Harry’s shoulders. 

Sometime between stumbling out of cab and bracing himself against the solid oak of his door, his handkerchief had fallen off. There’s no blood smeared tackily against wood. Harry flexes his hand, feels strength and healed muscle.

He leads the boy upstairs, past the first closed door and into the second. He can’t bear to have this boy in his bedroom, refuses to dwell on which boy he wants.

“Kneel,” he says, and the boy sinks to his knees, sweetly obedient without even a flash of cocky insouciance. 

Not bothering with the niceties of foreplay, Harry unzips, shoves his trousers into an undignified heap on the floor. The boy looks up with wide green eyes, trembling faintly.

“My darling boy,” Harry says. The firelight glows warm on his back and glints gold and beautiful off the boy’s hair.

When Harry wakes up, the bed beside him is empty, the fireplace burned down to a heap of grey ash.  His mouth tastes foul, like old blood and semen.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So this is unspeakably late. I had most of it written, but I didn't like the tonal shift. I still don't but here it is, in all its poorly articulated glory. Everybody's comments are lovely and deeply cherished.


	3. Chapter 3

 

Harry finds a heap of ash and splintered bone on his dining room table. With one broad brush of his arm, he sweeps the ashes onto the floor. Last night was a blur of golden limbs and thrusting. He had tried, in the final desperate moments before climax, to hold himself back. But he was hungry, so hungry, and the boy had been warm and willing.  

His bruises and wounds are completely gone, but his body feels hollowed out, like he’s playing marionettist to his body. 

Harry looks, really looks, at his house and garden. His house has lost the niceties of modern civilization; reeds are strewn on cold stone floors, candles drip their wax onto grotesquely writhing sconces.

Outside, withered and blackened fruit hang from gnarled branches. The sky flickers a sickly yellow green, the colour of unripe limes. He can’t remember the last time he pruned the trees, and their thorny branches have intertwined into an impenetrable bramble. 

He remembers a conversation

_Merlin –he said_

_“Incubus,” Merlin replied._

_“About that—” Merlin started to say._ About what? His memories sieve though his fingers like water. 

_what do you propose, wizard?_ _—Harry asked_

_“A bargain.” Merlin said._

_Merlin reached into his head, shattering him past the bounds of mortal form, and drew out a bullet and a tarnished block of pure silver._

A great glowing twist of magic is wrapped around his head like a crown or bandage. Harry traces reverent fingers through its silver strands and catches glimpses of golden hair and green-grey eyes and an echo of burning emotion.

What bargain?

## **

The taste of honey fades off of Eggsy’s tongue. The small pouch of herbs sits in his pocket, untouched.

_Harry is dead_.

Roxy had carefully explained, eyes large and wary on his face, that there were creatures that mimicked the deepest desires of the living. But for all their imitations, they lacked the humanity of living things.

The crisp memories of Harry fade, and Eggsy fears that he’ll lose the rough impressions he has left. Except, except it really wasn’t Harry, just a memory conjured up by the dark corners of his mind. One desperate aching night, he drenches his fingers in oil and inserts them as far up himself as he can reach. Afterwards, he licks them clean and can’t taste anything but himself, lightly accented with shit and oil. 

His chest aches, like he had a green and growing sapling torn out by the roots. He wants to forget.

## **

The house burns, and Harry burns with it. The hawthorn trees sublimate into plumes of emerald sparks and grey ash. He thinks he remember this, burning burning burning in a thousand sparks against the Kentucky sky, a sense-memory from when they cremated him and reduced him back to _this_.

Forests succeeded each other by fire. New growth sucked nutrients from the ashes of their predecessors. The great undying pine forests of the north were an aberration. Unnatural. Trees were meant to die by fire, by lightning and to return to the earth whence they came.

It had taken him a thousand years to create his house, to untwist the primal lust into human form, to forcibly wrest his humanity out of the muck that birthed him. All those years of work undone by yearning for a boy and a simple gunshot.

Harry wants to recreate himself, to shape himself out of the ashes.

_“I can give you humanity, true humanity, not this sad imitation,” Merlin had said._

_He had scoffed, disbelieving. —As easy as that wizard?_

_“No. You cannot be human if you remain tied to this place,” Merlin had said, and he knew that the wizard did not lie. The truth rang cleanly, clearly, even in Faen. “You’ll need a soul.”_

The house collapses in one great groan of flurrying sparks. Harry’s chest aches with grief mingled with joy. As his trees burn and die, he remembers more and more and more and wonders that he could ever forget Eggsy, _Kingsman_.

The nameless boy’s soul twists and expands uneasily in the lightless void of Harry’s heart. When Merlin took the silver block, he tore out something else.

## **

Galahad wakes and cannot remember his name. He dresses in automatic movements and finds himself in a grey Prince of Wales check. He touches the scarring of his temple and cannot remember why he expects the skin to be smooth.

He steps outside, and the bustling streets of London shock him with their noise and pollution.

In HQ, the techs have started hanging up boughs of hawthorn. _Beltane_ , he thinks. He remembers a house.

He reaches out to touch a delicate, blossoming flower, but suddenly, Lancelot tackles him to the ground. Her face is haloed in her hair, lit with the bright summer sunshine.

“This has gone on long enough.” She pulls him up and strides off, evidently expecting him to follow.

She slams the door to Merlin’s office open and enters without invitation. Merlin looks up, and Galahad winces sympathetically at the deep purple bags beneath his eyes. In his hands, Merlin holds a block of silver that quickly begins to tarnish. 

She plants her hands onto his desk and demands, “What kind of sick game with Eggsy are you playing?”

Eggsy twitches and doesn’t collapse under the sudden onslaught of memory. Roxy, Roxy Morton, Jamal, _Daisy_. Eggsy repeats the names to himself, but they sound hollow. Roxy catches his arm and guides him to sit on the armchair in front of Merlin’s desk. His chest doesn’t hurt as much.

Merlin sighs and runs fingers over the top of his head. “You didn’t take the enema that Roxy gave you.”

It’s not a question, but Eggsy nods anyways.

“I have a bargain for you lad,” Merlin says.

## **

Harry buries his fingers into the charred rich earth where his house once stood. The leaves have started to turn, tentative gold burnishing the tips of the oak trees. Hawthorne seeds germinate over the winter; they need the rigors of cold. His hands stumble over small lumps, too smooth to be seeds, and he unearths a handful of teeth.

He buries the teeth with shaking hands and doesn’t dig any further. He was built out of sex and death, death and sex, and the fruits of his labour lie buried in bone shards. The wolf felt no guilt for eating the weak or sick, the _stegodyphus lineatus_ spiders had no qualms over eating their mother alive from the inside out.

If this was humanity, Harry wanted no truck with it. He had drawn too close to the flame, thinking it was warmth and brightness and safety. 

_What is your price— he asked._

_Merlin smiled, kindly and terribly. “Your humanity is price enough.”_

Harry closes his eyes, lets himself seep back into the hungry earth. It would be a fitting grave, his bones would rest with the sucked-dry remains of all his previous conquests. He lets himself grieve, for himself, for Eggsy, for their might-have-been.

## **

“What would you pay to get Harry back?”  Merlin brings out a sprig of hawthorn, smelling of fresh cut sap.

“Harry is dead,” Eggsy says dully.

Merlin grins, full of teeth, “The dead can come back to life.”

Merlin hands him a hawthorn flower and presses the silver block into his chest. 

## **

When Harry opens his eyes, Eggsy is there.

Eggsy looks like a favourite song from childhood hummed in half-remembered snatches. The suit, the stance, the beautiful set of his jaw. Harry wants to run his fingers through that perfect hair until it falls into disarray. Eggsy isn’t—shouldn’t be the echoic memorial to a dead man, to Galahad née Harry Hart. A silvery web of scars run across his temple. Harry touches his own temple. The skin is smooth.

“Harry” Eggsy sounds like the name is being torn out of him, like his pain would scrape his mouth raw.

Harry latches onto the despair in Eggsy’s voice and _drags_. The world blurs into focus, and Eggsy staggers under the weight of Harry’s name, anchored desperately into the living world.

His strength returns to him.  The boy has collapsed on his knees, pale as summer snow and heaving breaths that hang and shimmer in the air like frost. 

“Please,” Eggsy says, “I can’t lose you again. Anything.”

_Anything_

Damn it all to hell and back.

Harry doesn’t want anything, he wants lazy mornings, half buried under covers and exchanging kisses with their feet tangled together, or Eggsy laughingly stealing toast squares, or the way Eggsy’s eyes glaze over when he nears orgasm. Harry wants to live, with an animal tenacity that refuses to let go.

The boy collapses onto Harry’s chest. Harry can feel the boy’s heart beating, hummingbird-fast, trapped in the cage of his ribs. His soul tastes like the brightness of spring mornings and the slow resonance of cellos.

Harry remembers abruptly how to tie a Windsor knot, how to throw a _Kingsman_ issue knife. The mantle of Galahad settles over Harry, and he tries his damnest not to luxuriate it its familiar warmth. The bonds tying Eggsy to the mortal realm unravel and wind themselves around Harry.

Harry feels the shocking bright laughter of Roxy and tries not to feel jealous of the depth of Eggsy’s regard for her. Daisy and Michelle detach themselves last and it’s too much, Harry tries to force them back to Eggsy, to return them, but the tendrils wither away into nothingness.

The hawthorn trees sprout and reach upwards. They flower, many-petaled and white with yellow centres. _Daisies_ , Harry realizes. _I didn’t know daisies grew on trees_. Eggsy looks peaceful, sleeping, as if he could be woken up with a kiss. The garden smells overwhelmingly like sunshine and summer, joy and innocence combined.

The house resurrects, ensconces Eggsy in thorny branches and bears him away. Harry reaches out, but the house doesn’t respond.

Harry suddenly becomes aware of the night-time hush of the forest and the forbidding leers of the gargoyles perched along the walls. He pushes at the gate, but it refuses to budge no matter how hard he strains.

“I tried all the gate-tricks I knew, but that gate of yours is stubborn.” Merlin detaches himself from the shadow of a tree. Under the light of the moon, his face is set in stern lines. “Although I suppose it’s Eggsy’s gate now.” 

He presses a small block of silver into his hands. Harry flinches back, expecting it to burn, but the silver remains cool to the touch.

“What is it?” Harry asks. He feels runes carved deep into the soft surface of the metal. He reaches for his rune-craft, but the jagged symbols remain incomprehensible. His knowledge of dream-walking, soul-eating, magic are all gone. He blinks and cannot remember what he was trying to remember.

Merlin tips his head at the house. “You know what it is.”

Harry’s hunger, omnipresent and inescapable, is gone.

“I don’t deserve this.” Harry feels Eggsy’s boundless love for the living green earth; it sits uneasily next to his loyalty to _Kingsman_. “ _He doesn’t deserve this fate_ , give it back to him.”

Merlin’s eyes are lightless pools in the dark. “You know it doesn’t work that way.”

## **

Eggsy wakes up.

He feels briefly disoriented, he thought he’d moved out, he remembered the burning down two months later in a freak electrical accident. Then, the hunger crashes down, drowning, and he doesn’t think for a long, long time.

## **

The morning sunshine hits Harry full in the face, exacerbating an already throbbing headache. His mouth tastes stale, with the characteristic soreness of an intubation tube. The steady beeping of medical and the familiar smell of antiseptic are reassuring. He survived another mission.

He remembers—he remembers his dreams, a boy named Eggsy—and small five-petaled flowers— _hunger—_ but then the headache catches up to him. He catches the hiss of something discharging, and the sweet pull of opioid painkillers drags him back under.

He wakes up again to Merlin looming over the foot of his bed like an overgrown bald vulture. For the briefest moment, he sees another Merlin, this one garbed in a grim grey cloak, overlain the features of his oldest and dearest friend. Harry blinks, and the image is gone. His head aches something awful, and he chalks it up to whatever medication medical likes to test out on the agents. He had the oddest dreams.

Exhaustion had carved deep furrows into Merlin’s face. Harry almost feels guilty for getting shot in the head.

“Do you know what year it is?” Merlin’s fingers are clenched, white-knuckled, around his clipboard.

“Don’t be ridiculous, I’ve been in a coma for however long recovering from _getting shot in the head_. But if I had to hazard a guess,” Harry stole a glance out the window. Snow. “Late 2014 or early 2015.”

“Close, late 2016. Do you know where you are?”

“Kingsman Medical.” That was apparent enough. Harry had spent enough time here recuperating from his ‘peacocking dramatics’ over the course of his long career. For all he liked to pretend otherwise, he was as human and fallible as any other man. “If you insist on performing the full battery of questions, let me pre-empt you. I’m Harry Hart, Agent Galahad, I was born May 22 in 1956 in a sma—“

“Your real birthday please.” Merlin’s eyes are oddly intent.

“May 22,” Harry repeats, utterly bewildered.

Merlin lets out a long breath, looking ten years younger. “Tell me, do these words mean anything to you: Hawthorn, Eggsy, bargain.”

Harry frowns, he did have odd dreams, but he dismisses it. Shakes his head. “Doesn’t mean anything to me.”

“Welcome back Agent Galahad,” Merlin says. 

## **

For in that sleep of death what dreams may come

When we have shuffled off this mortal coil

Must give us pause

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Neil Gaiman on the Orpheus myth: “But I’d look back, wouldn’t I? We all would. The ones who can’t look back, who can only stare into the sunrise ahead of them, stare into the glorious future, those people don’t get to visit Hell.”


End file.
